Aviasales is Yet Another Non-Endemic Sponsor Entering Esports

Aviasales.ru is Russia’s largest travel search engine—operating as Jetradar outside of CIS—and is the latest of the series of non-endemic sponsors entering the arena, in this case by sponsoring Na’Vi. Natus Vincere have not revealed the scope of the deal, but Yevhen Zolotarov—Na’Vi’s CEO—disclosed past deals have been worth between $200,000 and $600,000. Aviasales is being touted as one of the first CIS region non-endemic sponsors.

We can assume that this will be a six figure deal as that has rapidly become the common standard for this first quarter of 2017. It will be interesting to see whether these numbers grow over the next six months as brands begin to more aggressively compete over the more successful esports organisations. Na’Vi has actually embedded an Aviasales.ru/Jetradar search field into the partner page on its site, where it describes Aviasales as:[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Esports is the ideal way to reach a consumer demographic that has a relatively high disposable income and competitive consumer tendencies (the classic case of Keeping Up with the Joneses).[/perfectpullquote]

“Aviasales.ru and its subsidiary Jetradar.com – №1 website for planning trips will help to make your way to the venue. Also it’s the closest to eSports travel search engine – it’s Na’Vi new friend after all. So you just need to choose the date and the direction.”

Other recent notable entries include Visa, Audi, and Adidas—although Adidas has had various forays into the market previously—who all partnered with large, well established organizations such as SK Gaming and Astralis.

As stated in our previous coverage on these entries, esports is the ideal way to reach a consumer demographic that has a relatively high disposable income and competitive consumer tendencies (the classic case of Keeping Up with the Joneses), but is generally not interacted with in traditional advertising streams. Between the fact this demographic tends not to watch television and that they will generally have some form of ad blocking enabled, reaching these valuable consumers is a challenge. Slowly, brands are learning how to interact with these consumers, and as more high value brands such as Visa—and now Aviasales—find success in the esports arena, we will continue to observe further investment from more non-endemic brands and, of course, their competitors.